Working hard for the money

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich reveals what the working poor have long known: that you can, indeed, keep a good woman down

by Loren King

I remember watching Joan Rivers on CNN's Larry King Live a few years back. The comic said that, devastated and in debt when she was fired from her own talk show on Fox, she took whatever gigs were offered. You do what you have to do to survive, Rivers said. You clean toilet bowls if you have to.

A humble enough statement to awe Larry King. But a bit too flippant, perhaps, for the viewer who does indeed clean toilet bowls to survive, who knows the pain of back and knee strain, and who can't afford health insurance on a cleaner's meager wages. Luckily for Rivers, she never had to resort to cleaning toilets. But Barbara Ehrenreich chose to do so. The prolific Ehrenreich -- she's written 10 books and contributes regularly to Time and a host of other national publications, including the Nation and Esquire -- wanted to know, firsthand, whether it was financially possible for people turned off welfare rolls and thrust into the low-end job market to survive. It started out as "a mathematical proposition," Ehrenreich says. It became a sojourn among America's invisible poor: the underclass who serve food in restaurants, make beds in hotels, care for the elderly in nursing homes, run the cash register at the discount store, and, yes, clean toilet bowls. Ehrenreich's three-month odyssey as a low-wage worker in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota is chronicled in her new book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company).

Ehrenreich says she could have done objective research into how the working poor manage and how the social system fails them. She could have conducted interviews and cited statistics (the personal narrative of Nickel and Dimed is augmented by detailed statistics in footnotes). "I've done it the other way," says Ehrenreich, in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where she's on tour to promote her book. "This got the response. Sometimes I feel like saying, `Hey, why didn't anyone listen to me before?' This was a completely new kind of writing for me: in the first person, about my own experience."

Indeed, Ehrenreich's sharp, unsentimental observations about toiling as a waitress, maid, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart sales clerk speak louder than any research. When she writes of dodging the floor manager through aisles of merchandise at Wal-Mart in Minneapolis just so she can make a quick call on the pay phone to try to secure a motel room, the frustration and humiliation are more palpable than if she'd interviewed someone who stocks shelves at the store for a living. "I'm dialing the second motel when Howard reappears," she writes. "Why aren't I at the computer? he wants to know, giving me his signature hate smile. `Break,' I say, flashing him what is known to primatologists as a `fear grin' -- half teeth-baring and half grimace."

And when she describes the substandard living quarters she rents, such as the eight-foot-wide trailer in Key West's Overseas Trailer Park -- "a nest of crime and crack" -- because that is the best she can afford on her wages, one is drawn into her candid rendering of a life of catch-22s. "My subjective responses were the data," says Ehrenreich, who compiled her notes on a laptop at the end of the day. "If I felt humiliated or angry, that was what I wrote about." There was never any time during work shifts to write or take notes. In fact, the pace and the physical and mental exhaustion, exacerbated by management's rules regarding work-time behavior, were things Ehrenreich was not prepared for.

"The biggest surprise was in addition to how hard the work was, how little freedom low-wage earners have," says Ehrenreich, referring to draconian limits on break time and restroom trips (until April 1998, Ehrenreich notes, there was no federally mandated right to bathroom breaks). There were also the handbag searches (perfectly legal); drug testing (81 percent of large employers now require pre-employment drug testing, up from 21 percent in 1987); and rules forbidding waitresses or maids to sit, eat, or even drink water on the job. "I was not psychologically prepared for that," says Ehrenreich. "Here I am a mature woman being viewed by management as a potential thief or druggie or someone who is going to guzzle alcohol in the restroom. That shocked me."

Another surprise for Ehrenreich -- an observation that runs counter to the myth of the "welfare queen" -- was how much pride most of the unskilled workers took in their work. "I can see more than I did before how one can derive self-esteem from jobs," she says. "I found myself becoming fairly obsessed. That's countered by the attitude of management that employees are the enemy." At each of her low-wage jobs, Ehrenreich describes rules against, for example, eating or sitting at any time during an eight-hour shift. "Managers can sit -- for hours at a time if they want -- but it's their job to see that no one else ever does, even when there's nothing to do, and this is why, for servers, slow times can be as exhausting as rushes," she writes.

Ehrenreich says the increasingly authoritarian attitude of corporate management toward workers seems to have begun in the 1970s, when "fear of foreign competition created the idea that workers here were slackers compared with what you find in the Third World." She continues: "Then in the '80s came the mandatory drug testing and in the '90s the `personality tests' to intimidate and create an increasingly prison-like atmosphere" in the workplace. Her own experience with drug and personality testing on the job is bolstered by the book's footnotes, as when she cites a 1999 New York Times Magazine article's claim that personality testing in the workplace is at an all-time high and now supports a $400 million-a-year industry.

Workplace drug testing, meanwhile, is expensive and ineffective, according to another of Ehrenreich's footnotes: "The practice is quite costly. In 1990, the federal government spent $11.7 million to test 29,000 federal employees. Since only 153 tested positive, the cost of detecting a single drug user was $77,000. Why do employers persist in this practice? Probably in part because of advertising by the roughly $2 billion drug testing industry, but I suspect that the demeaning effect of testing may also hold some attraction for employers."

EHRENREICH STARTED her project in 1998 -- a time of prosperity, when the dot-com gold rush was at full tilt. At the same time, the 1996 federal welfare-reform measures and similar state mandates were ending benefits for millions of people. Ehrenreich was particularly interested in how the roughly four million women coming off welfare -- who would be thrust into the low-wage labor market with jobs that paid $6 and $7 an hour, and most of whom had children -- could possibly make it. Ehrenreich averaged $7 an hour as a low-wage worker, well above the federal minimum wage of $5.15, but she "never did manage to make ends meet." Almost 30 percent of the workforce toils for $8 an hour or less, according to the Washington, DC-based Economic Policy Institute.

"We never heard such praise of jobs and work as in the build-up to welfare reform," says Ehrenreich. "We heard over and over that `a job is the ticket to security and self-esteem.'" Ehrenreich's sobering experience reveals that the low-wage labor market offers few benefits, if any, and no security whatsoever. It also seems to conspire, through the rules forbidding eating and even talking on the job, to strip workers of self-esteem. And Ehrenreich, throughout her book, takes pains to concede that she was in the best of circumstances to get hired and function on the job: she is white and speaks English. "I was in excellent health and I had a working car. And I didn't have to leave my shift and go home to feed and care for kids," she says.

The experiment began in Key West, Florida, where Ehrenreich lives. Her first job was as a waitress at an inexpensive family-style restaurant she calls "Hearthside," working from 2 to 10 p.m. for $2.43 an hour plus tips. Ehrenreich moved out of her comfortable home and into an efficiency apartment 30 miles out of town. (The rules of her project were that she take the best-paying unskilled job she could get and live in the most affordable housing that was reasonably clean and safe.) It wasn't an anthropological project, Ehrenreich stresses; her information came from her own experiences and observations. "I never told anyone I was writing or asked them questions," she says. "It would have been weird if I had. My relationship was always about being the new person who has a lot to learn. Only after a couple of weeks did I begin to have conversations. When they arose, then I'd ask."

From Key West, Ehrenreich went to Portland, Maine, where she worked weekends at a nursing home and during the week for Merry Maids, a cleaning company that required workers to strap vacuum cleaners to their backs and that charged customers $25 an hour but paid the cleaners just $6.75. Her final job was at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis. (Ehrenreich chose these cities arbitrarily for geographic and demographic contrast.) Everywhere she went, Ehrenreich found her modest wages eaten up by the high costs of even substandard housing. She knew what she was in for from the start, she says. In 1998, the year she undertook her experiment, the National Coalition for the Homeless calculated that it took, on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment. In 1997, there were 36 units of affordable rentals available for every 100 families, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, DC.

Still, Ehrenreich was unprepared for the hard choices she and her co-workers faced. When another waitress at Hearthside decided to share a room with a friend at the nearby Days Inn, Ehrenreich was astounded. How could her co-workers even think of paying $40 to $60 a day for a motel room, which totaled an astronomical $1500 a month? What she found was that the workers doubled and tripled up in shabby rooms, because low-wage earners can afford to pay by the day or week, but can't come up with the huge sums needed to rent a more cost-effective apartment. This was a sobering realization for Ehrenreich.

When another Hearthside waitress, Gail, told Ehrenreich she was thinking of moving into the Days Inn, Ehrenreich's reaction was incredulity. She questioned the logic of Gail's choice -- it's more expensive to live in a motel, she told her -- and then realized that the poor are always caught in a numbers game. "But if I was afraid of sounding like a social worker, I have come out sounding like a fool," writes Ehrenreich. "She squints at me in disbelief: `And where am I supposed to get a month's rent and a month's deposit for an apartment?' I'd been feeling pretty smug about my $500 efficiency, but of course it was made possible only by the $1300 I had allotted myself for start-up costs when I began my low-wage life: $1000 for the first month's rent and deposit, $100 for initial groceries and cash in my pocket, $200 stuffed away for emergencies. In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything."

LOOKING BACK, Ehrenreich says she wasn't prepared for the complexities of the housing issue, and it remains a painful conundrum. "Affordable housing stock is shrinking and government support is dwindling," she says. "The private market isn't going to do it, so the government has to come in. But the government is not coming in. I don't know how full the shelters have to get before there is clamor for change."

Still, Nickel and Dimed is attracting attention. A chapter published in the January 1999 issue of Harper's won Ehrenreich the Sidney Hillman Prize for magazine journalism; last month Ehrenreich pitched the book on The Oprah Winfrey Show; and it's been widely reviewed, garnering a full page in the New York Times Book Review. The reason for that, Ehrenreich speculates, is her race, class, and social status.

"Maybe for more affluent readers, it helps to see it through the eyes of someone more affluent herself," says Ehrenreich. "I'm seeing it the way they might." Maybe it's also the subconscious fear that, in a faltering economy, and without in-demand skills, more of us than would like to admit it are afraid of having to resort to cleaning floors or toilets.

If we could last, that is. "There were many moments when I wanted to quit," notes Ehrenreich. "I was not prepared for the mental challenges. Physical, yes -- that's why I never wanted to waitress. But I have a PhD. in biology and I was straining to catch on, rushing to learn on the fly, whether it was compute ordering in a restaurant or memorizing the location of everything in Wal-Mart. There wasn't a lot of daydreaming time."

Ehrenreich says she'll never look at servers, maids, or cashiers in quite the same way again. She also learned that the unskilled labor force is as diverse as any other, with just as many gradations in education and ambition. When, toward the end of her experiment, she tells a few co-workers what she's really doing, the response is generally something on the order of "Does that mean you're not working your shift tomorrow?"

"Maybe I expected people to be impressed that I'm a writer," she says. "But I found out everybody writes. I met lots of low-wage workers who wrote poetry and kept journals." As she tours with Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich says she's gratified when, occasionally, "a housekeeper or a waitress come in [and say] it affirms things for them. I've had a few who've thanked me and said, `Now I know I'm not insane.' "

Loren King is a freelance writer living in Chelsea, Massachusetts. She can be reached at lking86958@aol.com.